No Way Back

By

William Shawcross

Updated Feb. 26, 2011 12:01 a.m. ET

In "The Long Road Home," Ben Shephard tells the story of how millions of dislocated people, stranded in the wreckage of Europe at the end of World War II, were enabled to go back to their native countries or to find new homes for themselves.

Mr. Shephard has done remarkable original research among contemporary official records and personal diaries and other accounts; his book is superbly sourced. One of its great merits is that he explains the 1940s in the ways in which people then saw them. He does not condemn people as "racist and xenophobic" simply because they expressed views that today would be considered beyond the pale. He acknowledges that "we have travelled a long way in sixty years," but he explores the 1940s with the maps of the time rather than the new certainties of today.

Led by Roosevelt and Churchill, the Allies were early on determined to avoid the postwar public-health and other disasters that befell millions of civilians after World War I. In 1943, the U.S. created the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), and Roosevelt told America that only by mobilizing "all the world" could "the sufferings of the little men and women who have been ground under the Axis heel" be relieved. Mr. Shephard rightly says that UNRRA "immediately became a vessel into which wartime idealism flowed." As with all international organizations, the funding came mostly from the U.S.

ENLARGE

Refugees loot a ruined food warehouse in Germany in May 1945.
Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Today the civilian suffering of World War II is often characterized by the German assault upon the Jews. Mr. Shephard reminds us that in the 1940s the concept of "the Holocaust" did not exist. There were no "Holocaust survivors"; there were instead millions of Displaced Persons (DPs), and it was UNRRA's job to succor them.

Even when all those who wanted to return home had been helped to do so, there were still in Germany and Austria more than a million Poles, Ukrainians, Latvians, Jews, Yugoslavs and others who did not wish to go back. Mr. Shephard observes that what was done with the mass of people whose lives had been overturned by the German war machine (many of whom were now threatened by the brutal Soviet hegemon) had lasting implications: Israel was created; American immigration policy was transformed; the Anglo-Saxon societies of Britain, Canada and Australia became much less homogeneous; and a new framework of international law emerged that gave rights to individuals as well as states.

The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second World War

By Ben Shephard Knopf, 489 pages, $35

Along with interweaving his accounts of political and military decision- making, Mr. Shephard gives us marvelous portraits of many of those who worked, at all levels, for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and of many DPs whose tragedies it tried to relieve. Kay Hulme was an American in her 40s who had worked in the war for a time as a shipyard riveter; by July 1945 she found herself helping to organize 20,000 Polish DPs in a former SS training camp in central Germany. This one camp needed nine tons of bread a day. Describing a mass of sleeping bodies by the railroad tracks, Kay said that she was reminded of a Renaissance painting—except that "Christ was absent"—whereupon Marie Louise, the Belgian nurse, resistance fighter and "failed" nun with whom she was working, rebuked her: Christ was never absent.

The two women struggled hard together on behalf of Polish and later Ukrainian DPs, and Kay's descriptions of feeding, organizing and trying to calm people who had suffered so much during the war are very touching. Kay preferred to run things with a small group of women—"I've always believed that women could do things. The women associated with me are rather elated at the opportunity of 'showing the men.' " They certainly did so, and she continued in relief work until returning to America, with Marie- Louise, in 1951 to become a writer. In 1956, Kay recounted Marie-Louise's life in her book "The Nun's Story," in the film of which Audrey Hepburn famously starred. The two women lived together in Hawaii for the rest of their lives.

Among the DPs whose life Mr. Shephard traces is Dr. Zalman Grin berg, a Lithuanian Jew of great re source fulness who managed to work as a doctor in his concentration camp and, after being liberated by the Americans in 1945, set up a hospital for Jewish survivors. In 1946 he had a moving reunion with his wife and his son, Emanuel, who had survived the war in the care of a Lithuanian wet nurse. They all went to Palestine, where he became an important physician. But Emanuel died, and in the 1950s Grinberg succumbed to manic-depression; he moved to the United States, where he retrained as a psychiatrist and was one of the first to treat patients with lithium.

There are hundreds of other well- observed characters moving through the pages of "The Long Road Home." This is an epic book, beautifully written and astonishingly well-researched. By recounting the mistakes as well as the triumphs made by the victorious Western countries in rebuilding the world out of the rubble of 1945, Mr. Shephard describes the foundations of our world today. He shows how much we owe to the men and women who worked so hard not for days, not for months but for years to restore decency to a world that had been engulfed in horror.

—Mr. Shawcross's latest book is "The Queen Mother: The Official Biography."

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